The Language Reformers of Lagado: Swift and the Myth of Linguistic Transparency

The Great Language Reform, lithography. AI image

"We next went to the school of languages, where three professors sat in consultation upon improving that of their own country."

— Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels

Introduction

Imagine attending a scholarly conference where every participant arrives carrying sacks, baskets, tools, household objects, and perhaps a wheelbarrow or two. Instead of speaking, the scholars communicate by displaying physical objects. A discussion about agriculture requires seeds and farming tools. A debate on government demands maps, coins, and legal documents. A geologist presenting a lecture on the Earth’s formation must somehow transport a vast collection of rocks, minerals, and fossils that stand in for epochs and geological strata.

The more learned the speaker, the heavier the burden.

This is not a scene from a surrealist novel. It is one of the linguistic reforms proposed at the Academy of Lagado in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726). The professors responsible for the project believe they have discovered a superior form of communication. Since words are merely names for things, they reason, why not eliminate words altogether and use the things themselves?

The proposal is absurd, and Swift intends it to be. Yet beneath the comedy lies a serious philosophical question. What exactly are words? Are they simply labels attached to objects in the world? Or is language something more complex?

More than a century before modern linguistics emerged, Swift transformed this question into one of the most memorable episodes in literary history.

The Language Reformers of Lagado

The Academy of Lagado is populated by inventors, scholars, and reformers engaged in projects of spectacular impracticality. Their schemes range from extracting sunbeams from cucumbers to building houses from the roof downward. Among these eccentric experiments, the reform of language occupies a special place.

Gulliver encounters three professors discussing how to improve communication. Their solution is radical. Since words are only names for things, they propose abolishing words entirely. People should simply carry with them the objects they wish to discuss.

The scholars acknowledge one minor inconvenience. Anyone engaged in complicated conversations would need to transport a considerable number of objects. Those involved in extensive intellectual pursuits would be obliged to carry correspondingly larger bundles upon their backs.

The implication is wonderfully ironic. In this new linguistic order, intellectual distinction becomes a physical burden. The most learned members of society would require the strongest shoulders.

The reformers are convinced that their proposal possesses another advantage. Communication through objects, they believe, would function as a universal language. Since the same objects exist in different countries, people from different nations could supposedly understand one another without translation.

Swift's satire works because the proposal appears almost logical at first glance. If words merely name things, then using the things themselves seems a reasonable improvement. The joke succeeds by taking a familiar assumption about language and pushing it to its extreme conclusion.

Why the Proposal Almost Makes Sense

The professors of Lagado are not simply fools. Their proposal reflects a conception of language that has deep roots in Western thought.

At first glance, language appears straightforward. We see a tree and call it "tree." We see a stone and call it "stone." Words seem to function as labels attached to objects, much like tags attached to items in a museum collection.

This view can be found, in a sophisticated form, in Aristotle's On Interpretation. Aristotle argues that spoken sounds symbolize affections of the soul, while these mental states correspond to things in the world. Different languages employ different sounds, but the underlying realities remain the same.

This framework proved enormously influential. It suggests a chain connecting words, thoughts, and things. Language serves as a system through which reality is represented and communicated.

By the Enlightenment, similar assumptions remained widespread. Language was often treated as a vehicle for expressing ideas that already existed independently in the mind. Words functioned as names for concepts, and concepts referred to objects in the world.

The professors of Lagado merely take this picture literally. If words are only intermediaries between people and things, why not remove the intermediaries altogether?

Their proposal reveals the hidden weakness of the theory. Communication involves far more than pointing to objects.

How does one carry "justice" in a bag? How does one transport "possibility," "memory," or "democracy"? Even apparently simple objects derive their meaning from contexts that no physical object can fully capture.

Swift's comedy exposes a serious limitation in the view that language is merely a catalogue of names.

Saussure Visits Lagado

Nearly two centuries after Gulliver's Travels, Ferdinand de Saussure would challenge precisely the assumption that Swift had mocked.

In his Course in General Linguistics, Saussure identifies what he calls the nomenclature view of language—the idea that language consists essentially of names attached to pre-existing things. He regarded this conception as misleading because it oversimplifies how language actually works.

For Saussure, words do not derive their significance from a direct connection to objects. Instead, meaning emerges from relations within a linguistic system. A sign consists of both a signifier and a signified, and its value depends upon its differences from other signs.

The word "tree" does not mean what it means because of some natural bond with actual trees. It acquires value through its place within a network of distinctions involving words such as "bush," "plant," "forest," and countless others.

This insight helps explain why the reformers of Lagado are mistaken. Communication cannot be reduced to exchanging objects because language is not merely a collection of labels. Meaning arises from a structured system of relations, conventions, and differences shared by a linguistic community.

The absurdity of carrying objects on one's back reveals something fundamental. Language does not function by attaching tags to reality. It operates through a complex web of social and conceptual relationships.

In this respect, Swift's satire anticipates a problem that modern linguistics would later formulate with much greater precision.

Conclusion

The professors of Lagado never succeeded in abolishing words. Fortunately so. Otherwise every academic conference would require pack animals, storage facilities, and an impressive logistics department.

Yet Swift's joke remains surprisingly relevant. By imagining a world in which people communicate through objects rather than words, he exposes the limitations of one of the most persistent assumptions about language: the belief that words are merely names for things.

Aristotle's reflections helped establish a tradition in which language, thought, and reality appeared closely connected. Centuries later, Swift transformed that tradition into satire, revealing the difficulties that arise when the theory is taken too literally. Saussure would eventually provide the linguistic tools necessary to explain why the professors' proposal could never work.

The enduring brilliance of the episode lies in its ability to combine comedy with insight. We laugh at the image of scholars staggering under piles of objects in order to hold a conversation. But the laughter carries a lesson. Language is not a transparent window onto reality, nor a simple catalogue of labels. It is a system of signs whose complexity cannot be reduced to the things it names.

Two centuries before modern linguistics, the professors of Lagado had already demonstrated—quite unintentionally—why language is indispensable.

Bibliography

Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. Project Gutenberg eBook #829. February 20, 1997. Updated September 6, 2023. Produced by David Price.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. "Course in General Linguistics." Translated and annotated by Roy Harris. With a new introduction by Roy Harris. Bloomsbury, 2013.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. Cours de linguistique générale. Edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, with the collaboration of Albert Riedlinger. Arbre d’Or, Genève, 2005.

Chandler, Daniel. Semiotics: The Basics. 3rd ed. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge; New York: Routledge, 2017.

ARISTOTLE. Categories and De Interpretatione. Translated with Notes by J. L. Ackrill. Clarendon Press, 1963. Clarendon Aristotle Series. Edited by J. L. Ackrill and Lindsay Judson. Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York, 2002.

Aristotle. Complete Works. 2012. "Complete Works." Identifier ark:/13960/t23b75x4g. ABBYY FineReader 8.0. 300 Ppi. Open Source Collection.